You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The sixth ‘Rugby Conferenc’ was attended by 66 delegates. Because the 1986 Conference had instructed the Working Party to organise some kind of federal structure for the proposed Standing Conference and to bring that federal structure to the next Conference for discussion and agreement, the main work of this Conference was done in groups of varying size. We had been a large Working Party who did not know each other at all well.
After a year of very hard work we had devised the most simple form of federal structure to present to Conference. Participating organisations would be asked to group themselves into six categories and each category would determine the criteria by which new organisations could join it. Of course, to inaugurate a Standing Conference those category criteria would be applied to the founding member organisations.
After a very interesting introduction to the whole theme of the development of a profession of psychotherapy by Deryck Dyne on the Friday evening, followed by a lively discussion, we had a fairly brief introduction to the requirements of category grouping on the Saturday morning. With my heart in my mouth I instructed the delegates to form themselves into groups but to make sure that no group left the Conference Chamber until all the groups had been formed. After a certain amount of struggle groups were formed with the exception of one pair of delegates who had a specific difficulty. At that point it was agreed that the groups would begin their work and that the Working Party would meet with the two delegates and discuss their difficulty. We did this and they went off to find a home in one of the categories and eventually met with success.
For the remainder of Saturday the Working Party stayed together as a resource group and was used in a number of ways by the category groups during the day. At the end of the afternoon we had our first plenary and discovered that the category of psycho-analytic psychotherapy was by far the largest and requi